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there were problems with that, and they presented themselves one after another when she sat down on the little two-seater sofa, its many cushions still arranged as she’d left them, and thought it through. She didn’t have the laptop anymore. Until she handed it over to DI Gorman, only Saturday had known she’d ever had it. By the time Gorman could have mentioned it to anyone, it was no longer in her possession, so there would have been no point for anyone to break into her flat to look for it.
    Besides, who would Gorman have mentioned it to? Someone at the council, to get a number for the developer working on the Dirty Nellie’s plans. But would he have mentioned Hazel’s involvement even in passing? Some clerk would look up a file, Gorman would phone the number, and he’d get … another clerk, probably. So he’d leave a message: a laptop handed in as lost and found, some plans on it, anybody missing one? Before long the message would reach the owner, who would call back and claim it.
    And say … and say … and say, perhaps, that he’d like to send some flowers as a thank-you; who was it who found it?
    Strictly speaking, DI Gorman shouldn’t have given either her name or her address. But he knew her, and maybe that altered things. Maybe he thought she’d appreciate a bunch of flowers. Maybe he couldn’t see what harm it would do.
    That should have been the end of the matter. The fact that it wasn’t, that instead of sending flowers, someone had broken into her flat, could have meant any number of things, but what it meant for certain was that this was no longer a simple case of restoring lost property to its rightful owner. Someone was behaving as if he had something to hide.
    Hazel spent a little more time going through the evidence before her, to make sure she wasn’t overreacting. Then she picked up the phone to call DI Gorman.
    Then she put it down again. The only one she’d spoken to about this was Dave Gorman. And after she’d spoken to him, someone had come and given her flat a thoroughly professional search. Did she really want Gorman to know that she’d noticed?
    The answers to two questions would tell her a lot more about what was going on, and would mean she could judge the honesty of the answers she was given to any other questions she asked. The Town Hall could give her the first piece of information. And just thinking about it carefully enough would give her the second.
    She phoned the Town Hall, asked for the Planning Department. “The developer on the Dirty Nellie’s proposal—can I have the name and address?”
    The planning officer was a bit sniffy, though not about giving out the information, which was a matter of public record. “We’re not calling it Dirty Nellie’s anymore. We’re calling it the Archway.”
    “Of course we are,” said Hazel encouragingly. The developers were Fenimore & Newman, with an address in Birmingham. “And was it Mr. Fenimore or Mr. Newman who was in Norbold last week?”
    “Neither. It was their structural engineer, Mr. Charles Armitage.”
    Googling him didn’t tell her very much more. He was a man in his late forties, married, with three children, who lived in the Clent Hills and had worked for Fenimore & Newman for eleven years. Nothing about his photograph suggested he was a man who’d break into other people’s flats.
    But if he had, or if someone had on his behalf, what had he been looking for? He’d already got his laptop back, or at least he’d been told it had been found and was waiting for him. He knew before someone took lockpicks to Hazel’s door that she no longer had his computer.
    So he wanted to know—she was working this out as she went along—if she’d had a look at the contents before she handed it in. With a password like PASSWORD, it was entirely possible. And the way he’d know that, without asking her, was … yes. If she’d seen something he didn’t want her to see, she’d have made a copy. He, or someone